Great Again? Donald Trump, Disinformation, and The New Relationship Between Truth and Politics
For many citizens of the United States and the world, November 8th, 2016 proved to be a day of reckoning. A man who built his campaign on lying, fear-mongering, boasting, slandering, and countless other negative campaign strategies was elected to be the President of the most powerful nation in the world. His victory was a slap in the face to the accepted norms of the past 50 years of American politics, and to the international order the United States had helped build following the devastation of the second world war. The victory of nationalist populism on the back of a campaign based on lies and fear was not localized to just the United States: the British people voted for Brexit, a fundamentally racist decision; while in Germany, another bastion of the liberal order, the AfD, a fringe far-right political party centered around restricting immigration gained an unprecedented number of seats in the German parliament.
President Trump’s 2016 victory should be seen as the culmination of different societal trends. It’s no secret to anyone who paid attention in 2016 that President Trump was carried to victory on the back of an incredible lack of faith in the American Political establishment, including both governmental institutions and the news organizations that report on them. We can see this clearly in the effectiveness that President Trump’s campaign messages of “Drain the swamp!” (representing a belief in a corrupt, liberal, government establishment), and “Fake news!” (an appeal to the growing lack of faith in American mainstream journalism). At a more societal level, President Trump’s victory also represented a fundamental shift in the relationship between politics and truth. His vision for America was one based on constant lies, something pointed out constantly by most journalists, politicians, and every day people — yet he still won. Therein lies the most important question from 2016. We should not be asking ourselves, ‘why did Donald Trump win the presidency?’ or ‘how did Donald Trump win the presidency?’ as these questions address President Trump as the problem with America, not just a symptom. Instead, we should be asking ourselves, ‘what does the 2016 presidential election reveal about the changing relationship between truth and politics?’
Before truly delving into this question, we must first ask ourselves what it means. The broader relationship between truth and politics exists on many levels. Do we expect our political leaders to tell the truth? Do we expect ourselves to make political decisions based on the truth? However, the far more important question is: can all people even identify truth in the political arena anymore? The short answer, according to W. Lance Bennett and Steven Livingston, is no; for a good many Americans, it has become impossible to distinguish truth, and not just in the political arena, but throughout many aspects of their lives (Bennet and Livingston 2018). The two hypothesize that many Americans today are unable to discern truth due to broader effects of the conversion mentioned earlier. Bennett and Livingston consider a lot of this to be the result of media organizations taking part in disinformation campaigns — which they define as “intentional falsehoods spread as news stories or simulated documentary formats to advance political goals,” (Bennett and Livingston 2018). Disinformation campaigns are a popular tactic for far-right groups everywhere, with popular media producers such as Breitbart and Info Wars in the United States serving as two excellent examples of, what are essentially, propaganda groups masquerading as news organizations. Even Fox News, a fairly mainstream news organization, is determined by the two scholars to sit in the middle ground between outright disinformation and simple partisan journalism (Bennett and Livingston 2018).
However, the origins of these groups and the mechanics of their effects on people are far more concerning. Sometime in the late 20thcentury, news in American began to change. First, with the introduction and widespread use of the television came nationally broadcasted news programming, giving wealthy and powerful people with a national agenda a tool with which to spread their message. This saw the rise of the first partisan news networks, Fox and MSNBC. However, there was still a barrier to entry for most groups; the infrastructure needed to broadcast nationally was incredibly expensive. Nevertheless, the convergence continued, and the, then cutting edge, now traditional means of media output began to become outdated; the internet was invented. The internet provided a way for people to communicate with national audiences virtually for free, especially as the popularity of social media, such as Twitter, soared. Which is where the idea of the mean world syndrome starts to come into play — as people begin to understand the world around them as a far worse place, they begin to seek alternative explanations for why that is that may fit with any previously held values or beliefs they had, playing into the idea of confirmation biases. One effect of the ability to choose from biased news sources is filter bubbles — media consumers end up exclusively consuming media from a select set of producers, filtering out other information, sources, or sides in national debate, beginning to degrade some of their ability to discern truthfulness in media.
W. Lance Bennett and Barbara Pfetsch expand on this idea in another article, writing about how the blame for this doesn’t just rest solely on media consumers; political operatives and reporters have also lost the ability to effectively communicate with the public (Bennett and Pfetsch 2018). The two state that most politicians and political operatives rely on a communication strategy centered around “spin and complex news management,” (Bennett and Pfetsch 2018). This strategy, while once effective, is not one that has retained its effectiveness in an era defined by the constant evolution of media. One of the first flaws in this effective strategy is the traditional understanding of mass media as gatekeepers who get to decide which issues receive national attention (agenda setting theory). As Bennett had noted in his writing with Livingston, the convergence of media has for the most part made that assumption obsolete. Traditionally, politicians interact with the public under this assumption, and through the press — politicians give speeches, covered by reporters, or press briefings, covered by reporters, and while many of these events are filmed for public consumption, people’s understandings of them were still often obtained through news reports. However, people no longer interact with the process of politics through this same chain of communication.
As Bennett and Pfetsch discuss, social media has completely changed the way everyday people interact with politics. There is the aforementioned ‘information siloing,’ or filter bubbling, wherein the readership for traditional, or legacy, media is in relative decline, and the readership for fringe disinformation groups is skyrocketing. Consequentially, trust in these fringe media producers is skyrocketing, while societal trust in legacy media is plummeting. Another interesting effect of social media though is that it enables direct communication between disinformation campaigns, politicians, legacy news sources, and normal citizens, allowing information to travel between these groups effortlessly — therefore completely throwing the traditional flow of the Agenda-setting theory out of line. One of the most significant effects of this is that it allows fringe media influencers and disinformation campaigns determine the subject of national conversation, which Bennett and Pfetsch illustrate through the rise of the birther campaign. Under a traditional understanding of the way national discourse is determined, it would have been completely unfeasible for the national public to call for the president to release his own birth certificate, as no nationally respected news outlet would be willing to report on unsubstantiated rumors such as those that spawned the birther crisis. However, given the popular platform that social media granted the ‘founders’ of the movement and underlying racial tensions in the US, the birther movement was able to obtain a cult following and reach the national conversation.
One of the most interesting takeaways from Bennett and Pfetsch’s writing is the idea that a lot of voters either don’t care about truth in politics or are no longer able to recognize it, thanks to information silos, filter bubbles, and a deeply held confirmation bias. Martin Montgomery wrote his own take on this, examining President Trump’s campaign rhetoric — both from a political science and communications studies view point. Martin writes that many political pundits point to the mass appeal of President Trump’s authoritarian populist rhetoric. Montgomery explores how Trump’s style of authoritarian populism would have had a unique appeal to Trump’s electoral base — which was overwhelmingly white, male, without a higher education, and from either rust belt states or rural areas. To explain why this appeal worked for that demographic, Montgomery quotes a section from Hoschild’s book Strangers in their Own Land, to explain the way that many working-class white Americans feel that liberal government policies and government overreach give people less deserving than themselves the ability to cut in line for the American Dream. While the section of the book itself is quite long, the piece that best fits this analysis is the following:
You are patiently standing in the middle of a long line stretching toward the horizon, where the American Dream awaits. But as you wait, you see people cutting in line ahead of you. Many of these line-cutters are black — beneficiaries of affirmative action or welfare. Some are career-driven women pushing into jobs they never had before. Then you see immigrants, Mexicans, Somalis, the Syrian refugees yet to come. (Hochschild 2016, Chapter 9 The Deep Story)
This idea does quite accurately depict a lot of the political sentiment felt by President Trump’s electoral base: the belief that they had been forgotten by a liberal government concerned with people society had left behind. They feared that in the efforts to bring these societal others to the table, they themselves would be left behind. They were possessed, essentially, by fear thatthegovernment was no longer theirgovernment.
However, Montgomery believed there was something more at play than just the appeal of authoritarian and nationalist populism to many Americans. Montgomery noticed something else, Americans have almost always disapproved of politicians who overtly lie to them; so how was it possible then for Donald Trump, a near pathological liar, to be elected to the highest office in the nation? Montgomery hypothesized that something more was going on, political trends that made no sense in a traditional understanding of the mechanics of politics had taken place (2017). Montgomery illustrates how Aristotle believed that rhetoric existed on 3 fronts, pathos, logos, and ethos; President Trump’s campaign relied almost entirely on pathos and ethos. He used ethos by always painting himself as the only qualified candidate, frequently citing his personal wealth, business success, and masterful negotiating skills (Montgomery 2017). Trump used this boasting strategy to make the campaign about him, as opposed to about issues. An appeal to emotion, or pathos, was tied into this as well — he spoke in simple terms and used hyperbole to paint the world and its problems as far worse than it is, while the world with his solutions as a far better place than it was (Montgomery 2017). All of this gave people the perception that President Trump was speaking off the cusp, proclaiming his own beliefs, not the beliefs of a party or group, and giving him the air of someone speaking one on one to his listeners, as if at a bar. While almost nothing Trump said was truthful, it all lent him an air of authenticity, and Montgomery believes that President Trump’s perceived authenticity appealed far more to voters than any perceived truth would.
Orly Kayam built on this idea that Trump’s rhetoric was of a unique appeal to his electoral base, giving him the image of and authentic, anti-establishment candidate in his own writing, providing a detailed analysis of the rhetoric used by Donald Trump throughout his campaign. Whereas Montgomery left it at President Trump relying on ethos and pathos, Kayam laid out what he believed to be the six rhetorical pillars of the President’s campaign: anti-politically correct, negativity, simplicity, only I can, hyperbole, and marketing (Kayam 2018). The first, anti-politically correct, was Trump’s strategy to ignore the rules of political correctness and portray himself as someone who ‘tells it like it is,’ and speaks authentically, without fear of offending people. This can be seen in his descriptions of Mexican immigrants or the war on Christmas. Trump’s negativity was not only addicting for many viewers, but it also kept him constantly in the national discussion, as most national news broadcasters had to report every outrageously negative claim President Trump made, giving him constant news cycles. President Trump also used simplicity, both speaking at a 4thor 5thgrade level without complex syntax, and often without complete sentences, and by presenting simple solutions to complex problems (some would say that ignored the complexities of national problems). The strategy ‘Only I can’ is exactly as it sounds: President Trump portrayed himself as the only qualified candidate for the job, citing his incredible intelligence, wealth, and successful business career. The President also made an expert use of hyperbole to convince people any problems were significantly worse than in reality, while portraying any solutions he offered as significantly more effective than they could be. Finally, every aspect of the campaign was centered around catchy marketing, which is clearly represented in the reliance on catchy slogans such as ‘Make America Great Again,’ ‘Fake News,’ or ‘Lock Her Up.’ Kayam agrees with Montgomery that all of these rhetorical strategies made President Trump seem like the most authentic candidate in the race. Whereas his opponents were politicians providing tailored answers to questions, Trump always spoke his own mind and wasn’t tied to any one group.
At this point, scholarship on Post-Trump politics aggregately brings us to one conclusion — rapid changes in media that rendered traditional political communication inept, combined with a growing lack of faith in government and the perception that the world was becoming a meaner place set the perfect stage for Trump’s campaign, fueled by simple and populist rhetoric from a non-politician, to claim the presidency. Essentially, when presented with the choice between authenticity and truth, American chose authenticity. Maybe because we, as Americans, are dumb; maybe because we were misled. It’s also clear from these articles that the effects of massive media changes on the right precipitated 2016 as well, fundamentally changing the way right-wing voters deal with truth in politics. However, as Stefanita, Corbu, and Buturoiu write, this style of thinking falls prey to the Third Person Effect. The Third Person Effect is the idea that we never perceive the negative effects of media on ourselves or our in-group (Beauchamp and Baran 2018). One of the main principles of the three’s writing is that the way we study the election of Donald Trump often presumes that only members of the right in America have fallen prey to the vast changes in media. One of the more interesting findings of the article is that the more people perceive the presence of fake news (or disinformation) in the media, the more likely they are to associate its effect with an out-group. The problem then is that most communication scholars, as members of the liberal elite, write about trends in politics and national discourse as having in inherent effect on the right (seeing as disinformation and other new media trends are more common for right-wing groups) but not on the left or society as a whole.
So how do we rectify this situation? How do we take these conclusions about what paved the way for President Trump’s election and combine it with the knowledge that much of our perception of the right is affected by the Third Person Effect? We start with what we know to be true. As most communications authors acknowledge, the convergence (and more specifically the spread of the internet) has completely changed the way that political communication occurs in this country. Social media and the internet have removed the high barrier to entry that used to exist in media, as they are virtually free to use — unlike the technology needed to broadcast on TV. This opened the door for organizations and political groups who had never before had a national voice to unite across the country. huge component of the societal changes that have fueled both the rise of Democratic Socialism on the left and the takeover of the Republican party by the far right. People also have a historically unprecedented choice in where they get their news and their information — a fact that has provided the space needed in the national discourse for the unprecedented rise and popularity of disinformation campaigns, such as Breitbart. Given the nature of these organizations, many people have begun to view them as news, or as truth. Society is also experiencing a never before seen level of filter bubbles — wherein people filter out information that disagrees with their beliefs, positions, or values.
A lot of political and communications scholarship concludes from these ideas that there is a growing divide between political institutions and the people they serve, especially as political institutions, both government and journalists, have failed to adapt to the changing mechanics of national communication. It’s why Hoschild concluded that many people feel left behind or ignored by government; it’s why Montgomery believes many Americans chose Donald Trump’s authenticity over the political establishment; it’s why Kayam concludes that Trump’s anti-political establishment messaging was so incredibly effective; it’s why Lance and Pfetsch write that many people are more willing to listen to disinformation campaigns based on anti-government agendas. However, given the effects of the Third Person Effects (based on the work of Stefanita, Corbu, and Buturoiu), and the identity of many of these scholars as members of the liberal elite, it stands to reason they would conclude that the right chose authenticity over truth by ignoring the truth.
I believe this to be a faulty understanding of society. Rather these studies demonstrate that a large percentage of the American electorate is divided into two different groups that each have a different truth. In the work of Bennett and Livingston they cite Eli Pariser’s The Filter Bubble. In this book, Pariser details the growing polarization in our society, although the best illustration of this comes at the beginning. Pariser first introduces Google’s 2009 policy decision to base the search results it provides off of data and information gathered from 57 sources about the user. He then provides a story about two friends; shortly after the Deepwater Horizon BP oil spill in spring 2010, he asked two friends to Google ‘BP.’ Both friends, he reports, were fairly wealthy white women with a liberal political leaning. One friend saw exclusively search results about investment information and BP stocks while the other saw news about the spill (Pariser 2011). He concludes this story by asking his readers to “imagine how different [the results] would be for [his] friends and, say, and elderly republican in Texas,” (Pariser 2011, Introduction). The significance of this idea should be clear; the internet, the go-to tool of the 21stcentury citizen, may provide each of us with different information, and therefore different truths.
This essay began by asking what President Trump’s victory shows about the changing relationship between truth and politics. The easy answer is that in politics there is no truth, because voters no longer demand truthful leaders. But this answer ignores the complexities of the sentiment behind the election of Donald Trump and the changes in national communication that made it possible. Instead, our understanding should be that the convergence of mass media and its effects (such as the creation and enforcement of filter bubbles) have created two different Americas with two different fundamental truths. Trump voters weren’t choosing authenticity over truth, nor were they fooled by his rhetoric; rather he spoke their truth and that’s why they voted for him.
The idea that different people have different truths is neither new nor daunting, just look at the vast diversity of religions in the world. However, the scale at which these differing truths exist in the United States today is terrifying. To some extent, the different understandings that Americans have on certain issues render their perceived existences to be in, what are essentially, entirely different worlds. Some live in a world where climate change is a pressing threat and must be addressed, others in a world where climate change was a hoax invented by corrupt liberal elites; some live in a world where government should fight to protect the rights of all, others, not so much. While I don’t perceive to know the solution to this — the implications are clear. Much of the polarization in America is in large part due to, or at least exacerbated by, these media trends. The first step to fixing a violently polarized America is to attempt to fix this information divide and restore at least some semblance of universal truth.
[This article is adapted from a paper written over the course of the author’s bachelor studies. For the full paper, please send a message.]
References
Beauchamp, S. R., & Baran, S. J. (2017). Introduction to Human Communication. Perception, Meaning, and Identity. New York: Oxford University Press.
Bennett, L. W., & Livingston, S. (2018). The disinformation order: Disruptive communication and the decline of democratic institutions. European Journal of Communication, 33(2), 122–139.
Bennett, L. W., & Pfetsch, B. (2018). Rethinking Political Communication in a Time of Disrupted Public Spheres. Journal of Communication, 68, 243–253.
Kayam, O. (2018). Donald Trump’s Rhetoric. How an anti-political strategy helped him win the presidency. Language and Dialogue, 8(2), 183–208.
Montgomery, M. (2017). Post-truth politics? Authenticity, populism and the electoral discourses of Donald Trump. Journal of Language and Politics, 16(4), 619–639.
Pariser, E. (2011). The Filter Bubble: How the New Personalized Web Is Changing What We Read and How We Think. New York: Penguin Press.
Stefanita, O., Corbu, N., & Buturoiu, R. (2018). Fake News and the Third-Person Effect: They are More Influenced than Me and You. Journal of Media Research,11(3), 5–23. https://doi.org/10.24193
